


Five Children Rogrigo Borgia Loved and Lost

by mayfriend



Category: Borgia: Faith and Fear, Borgias - Ambiguous Fandom
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Children dying before their parents is not good, F/M, Gen, Grief/Mourning, If you have not watched this show: trust me and watch this show, Minor Character Death, Yeah you heard me Juan's a minor character, fight me, spoilers obviously
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-08
Updated: 2018-02-08
Packaged: 2019-03-15 14:28:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13615296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mayfriend/pseuds/mayfriend
Summary: It's a terrible thing, for a father to bury his children. Rodrigo Borgia knows this better than most.





	1. Jeronima

**Author's Note:**

> Well, I just finished _Borgia: Faith and Fear_ after about two weeks, and I went right back to the first episode to watch the whole thing again. Yes, it is that good, please, please watch it, and then create fanworks about it, because it is one of the best television series I've ever seen and it gets so little love it is criminal.

She is is his first, and that is all there is to be said about it, really. Even if she had been a terror, a right hellion, she would still have had a special place in his heart as his firstborn. But she wasn’t terrible, or disobedient, or brattish; she had been wonderful. And that had made it worse.

Her mother had been a serving wench, no great love like  _ La Rosa  _ or  _ La Bella  _ would be, but when Rodrigo had set his eyes upon her in that small, dingy room after spending half a night pacing, listing to her screams of pain, panicking over becoming a father when he had sworn to a life of celibacy, he fallen in love with her for a brief moment, because in her arms was the most gorgeous thing he had ever seen. 

The newborn had no more beauty than babies normally do - still covered in blood and gore, her mother sweating like a big in the summer heat - but Rodrigo had felt a pull, a tug in his chest, that told him  _ mine, mine, mine.  _ And he had listened to that instinct, had held his daughter with eyes filled with tears, had set both she and her mother up in a respectable house. Had always visited, even when his position was at risk, even after his uncle, the Pope, had passed and his life was in danger. His cousins had slunk away, run to Spain, but he could not. Would not. Just as much for Jeronima, a bastard daughter anyone else would have forgotten about after a few years, as for his own ambition.

He buys her dresses in fine silk he can’t really afford, jewels that can never shine as brightly as her eyes. When she comes of age, he finds her a husband, a good man with riches to spare, and she weeps with happiness, throws her sweet, soft arms around him, and it feels like coming home. Unlike with Juan, Cesare, Lucrezia, he never tells her that he is her father. He doesn't need to. Jeronima had always been so, so clever; cleverer than he’d ever been. And as his first, his eldest, she is there for all the others. She teases Pedro Luis, comforts Isabella, keeps tabs on his youngest three from a distance when his relationship with  _ La Rosa  _ crumbles. She advises him, soothes him, listens to him.

She dies in a fire. Rodrigo wonders what he did, what he did for God to punish him so terribly. Death, he could have taken, he thinks. But her death?  _ Hers?  _ For a while, he thinks the grief will kill him, thinks it will eat him whole, but  _ La Bella  _ saves him from himself. Mostly. He has nightmares, over and over, of that baby, that beautiful baby that had awakened something in him that he’d never known before, burning, screaming. Her precious skin blackening and hair smoking and wailing at the top of her tiny, tiny lungs.

She haunts him. She will always haunt him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I made a shitty edit of this chapter on my tumblr, so come look at that [here](http://mayfriend.tumblr.com/post/172755359720/)


	2. Pedro Luis

Pedro Luis was a prodigy as a toddler. Rodrigo had delighted in him - he spoke three languages at the age of four, could do algebra and recite  _ Genesis  _ in its entirety without pause. He grew into a quiet boy, who longed for Rodrigo’s affection, and Rodrigo tried to give as much of himself to him as he could afford, which is less than any child needs. He practiced swordplay into the wee hours, played  _ jeu de paume _ like a professional, but after every point he scored he looked over his shoulder at Rodrigo, searching for approval, for that endless, fatherly love that Rodrigo could not give him, no matter how hard he tried.

He sends him off to Spain as much for his own good as for Rodrigo’s. Rodrigo cannot bear to let him down, and he will, eventually. This way, he tells himself, his son will remember him as young and strong, before age bleaches his hair and wrinkles his face. This way, his son will know and love Spain, the motherland, like Rodrigo does. Maybe there he will find the guidance that Rodrigo has always felt he failed to give him.

For a time, it goes better than Rodrigo could have hoped.  

His son is a war hero, beloved of the king of Spain, a duke and a folk hero, a crusader and Rodrigo’s chest expands with pride. He imagines, after he is gone, Pedro Luis as the head of the family - because he has a sense of family as strong as Rodrigo’s own. He can see him in Mantua, in the orchards, with children who did not have to fight for a place in the world as their father and grandfather did.

That dream, too, dies a sudden and horrible death along with his son. He will always wonder why he did not fall apart in the same way he did with Jeronima and Juan. He will always hate himself for never being enough for a little boy who needed him.


	3. Juan

He remembers little of what happened after he was told of Juan’s death. He remembers tearing at his skin, begging to know  _ why  _ he has lost three children, but death will not take him. He begs God, he begs him, to take him instead. Begs him to return life to Juan’s empty corpse, to throw him into the bowels of hell if it means that his children will stop dying before they have lived.

Juan was not a good man. He will admit that to himself, many years afterwards, but Rodrigo loved him so much it hurt. He loves him enough to keep his face painted on the walls of his apartments until he dies, no matter how often Gacet hints that it will only make the pain worse.

What Gacet doesn’t understand, having no children himself, is that Rodrigo wants the pain to stay with him. He wants it to remain, far past the time of when he had scratched away his own flesh but his body just grew more. His body still lived, still carried on, even as he watches, paralysed by his own grief and guilt, as his son - his beautiful, beautiful son - is sealed in his tomb.

The likeness is good, he allows as he looks at the way the marble Juan lies atop his son's resting place, as if sleeping. But it is not good enough. It never will be. It will never move, never breathe. It will never scream  _ uncle Rodrigo!  _ in surprised joy as he visits Vanozza unannounced, never tackle his legs with such force he almost falls over. It will never call him  _ father  _ for the first time as a young man who has spent his whole life wanting _someone_ and realising Rodrigo could be that someone, and grow taller than him. It will never smile, all teeth, or eat or kiss or fuck ever again. It will never age or weep or change.

No matter how sublime, no matter how still, no matter how peaceful, the statue will never be his son. Because his son had never been peaceful. That had been part of why Rodrigo had loved him so fiercely.


	4. Cesare

Cesare survives him. 

He had never thought he would not. He had always feared, after Jeronima and Pedro Luis and Juan, that he’d lose another child, but he’d always worried about his Lucrezia, to childbed, or Laura, to some disease that struck children hard and fast, rather than Cesare whenever he strode into battle. 

Rodrigo recognised something in Cesare that he had both feared and adored. Cesare was the first of his children that reminded him, unsettlingly and unfailingly, of him. Jeronima had been saintlike, smart and beautiful, but without that need for power and validation that drove Rodrigo. Pedro Luis had been a brilliant tactical mind, but he had no way with people - to a stranger, he seemed cold, aloof, whilst Rodrigo had learned as a young man that it was too dangerous to be anything but genial to any and everyone. Juan had no caution, and was driven by his lusts and wants and furies.

But Cesare… Cesare was a mirror. 

Rodrigo saw in his ambition a young boy who had grown up in Spain, who had rebelled against the priesthood before throwing himself into the politics of Holy Mother Church entirely, determined to climb to the top of the heap. In his temper, he sees himself, head to head with della Rovere, spitting insults back and forth. In his brilliance, his son speaks Rodrigo’s thoughts aloud before Rodrigo has even had the chance to think them. In his kindness, Cesare humbles him, and makes him remember a softer, kinder boy that had loved more than he had ever hated.

So no, Rodrigo had never feared Cesare predeceasing him. He had known, that they were alike in more ways than they were not; and that as Rodrigo himself was a survivor, Cesare was the same.

Rodrigo never feared losing Cesare, his looking glass, to death, but maybe he should have feared losing him to legend instead.


	5. Isabella

Isabella is the first and only child of his that he purposefully cuts out of his heart. (Vanozza would perhaps disagree, but he remains sure that Gioffre is not his seed. Because unlike all the others, there is nothing of him in Goffredo, not even the barest trace. You cannot remove someone from your heart if they had never been there in the first place.)

She is his, and not, all at once. Because Jeronima’s death - his dear, darling Jeronima - had devastated him, completely and utterly, and he had lost himself. She had come to him weeping, supported by a singed chamber maid who had found her, quaking outside of the wreckage, not making a sound. He had wept too, when he found out whose house it had been, who exactly had been inside the burnt out husk.

Isabella had not spoken for two days, and when she did, he wished she hadn’t.

_ You killed your own kin?  _ He can still remember the horror he felt, the disgust, the fury. The way his voice and hands shook in tandem. The edges of red that had closed in at the edges of his vision, tunnelling in on her white face.  _ You murdered my Jeronima? _

Murdered had been unfair. She hadn't meant to kill anyone. But she hadn’t screamed for help either. She had knocked the candle, she had burnt the house down, she had left his Jeronima to her terrible, painful fate when perhaps she could have been saved.

And for what? What had all that horror been for? What had his firstborn died for? Nothing, save a child’s wish to escape a marriage to a man who would love her, support her, cherish her. A match that Rodrigo had weighed and worried over and bargained for, because he had wanted his spring rose to be happy. A match that Jeronima had helped arrange, telling him not to feel any guilt as Isabella resisted, that she had been a little scared too when she had been betrothed to her beloved, but that she was happy now.

Once, all Rodrigo had wanted was for his children to be happy. But should have known better. They were Borgias, after all.

Rodrigo considers, for a long moment, rescinding the dowry, throwing her out on the street as a reward for her crime. But the deal is already done with the Mattuzzi, and his Jeronima had worked so hard for it, for what little thanks she got ( _ burning, burning in the darkness)  _ so he sends her off without a backward glance instead. His last words to her were  _ I am no longer your father. You are no longer my daughter. Begone. _ He washes his hands of her, doesn’t allow himself to care as she cries for forgiveness, for a look, for anything, even as he lies awake, night after night, tortured by the the nightmares of his little girl burning that still flicker in his mind during waking hours.

He would like to say that he would have forgiven her without Lucrezia’s interference, but that would be a lie. He would like to say that he doesn’t flinch when he looks at her sometimes, long after they are a family again, but he cannot, because both she and Jeronima had the same eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed, as much as anyone can enjoy a story about a father having to deal with his children predeceasing him. Please leave kudos, comment and bookmark if you did like it!
> 
> Find me on tumblr at: [mayfriend](http://mayfriend.tumblr.com)


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